The Sorrows of Young Werther ([ˈveːɐ̯tɐ];German:Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), or simplyWerther, is a 1774epistolary novel byJohann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in theSturm und Drang period inGerman literature, and influenced the laterRomantic movement. Goethe, aged 24 at the time, finishedWerther in five and a half weeks of intensive writing in January to March 1774.[2] It instantly placed him among the foremost international literary celebrities and was among the best known of his works.[1][2]
The novel was inspired by Goethe's personal life, and involvingtriangular relationships of real people. One triangular relationship involved Goethe, Christian Kestner, and Charlotte Buff (who married Kestner); and the other involved Goethe, Peter Anton Brentano,Maximiliane von La Roche (who married Brentano), andKarl Wilhelm Jerusalem. Jerusalem committed suicide on the night of Oct 29 or 30, 1772. He shot himself in the head with a pistol borrowed from Kestner.[3] These events are fictionalized to describe the emotional tumult of the titular character Werther, who kills himself in despair after he falls in love with a woman engaged to another man.
Most ofThe Sorrows of Young Werther, a story about a young man's extreme response tounrequited love, is presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young artist of a sensitive and passionate temperament, to his friend Wilhelm. These give an intimate account of his stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based onGarbenheim [de;it;nl], nearWetzlar),[4] whose peasants have enchanted him with their simple ways. There he meets Charlotte, a beautiful young girl who takes care of her siblings after the death of their mother. Werther falls in love with Charlotte despite knowing beforehand that she is engaged to a man named Albert, eleven years her senior.[5]
Despite the pain it causes him, Werther spends the next few months cultivating a close friendship with them both. His sorrow eventually becomes so unbearable that he is forced to leave Wahlheim for Weimar, where he makes the acquaintance ofFräulein von B. He suffers great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a friend and unexpectedly has to face there the weekly gathering of the entire aristocratic set. He is not tolerated and asked to leave since he is not a nobleman. He then returns to Wahlheim, where he suffers still more than before, partly because Charlotte and Albert are now married. Every day becomes a torturing reminder that Charlotte will never be able to requite his love. She, out of pity for her friend and respect for her husband, decides that Werther must not visit her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and they are both overcome with emotion after he recites to her a passage of his own translation ofOssian.
Even before that incident, Werther had hinted at the idea that one member of the love triangle—Charlotte, Albert or Werther himself—had to die to resolve the situation. Unable to hurt anyone else or seriously consider murder, Werther sees no other choice but to take his own life. After composing a farewell letter to be found after his death, he writes to Albert asking for his two pistols, on the pretext that he is going "on a journey". Charlotte receives the request with great emotion and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but does not die until twelve hours later. He is buried between two linden trees that he had mentioned frequently in his letters. The funeral is not attended by any clergy, or by Albert or Charlotte. The book ends with an intimation that Charlotte may die of abroken heart: "I shall say nothing of . . . Charlotte's grief. . . . Charlotte's life was despaired of."
Werther was one of Goethe's few works aligned with the aesthetic, social and philosophical ideals that pervaded the German proto-Romantic movement known asSturm und Drang, before he andFriedrich von Schiller moved intoWeimar Classicism. The novel was published anonymously, and Goethe distanced himself from it in his later years,[1] regretting the fame it had brought him and the consequent attention to his own youthful love ofCharlotte Buff, then already engaged toJohann Christian Kestner. Although he wroteWerther at the age of 24, it was all for which some of his visitors in his old age knew him. Goethe had changed his views of literature radically by then, even denouncing theRomantic movement as "everything that is sick."[6]
Colored engraving of Werther and Lotte
Goethe described the powerful impact the book had on him, writing that even if Werther had been a brother of his whom he had killed, he could not have been more haunted by hisvengeful ghost. Yet, Goethe substantially reworked the book for the 1787 edition[1] and acknowledged the great personal and emotional influence thatThe Sorrows of Young Werther could exert on forlorn young lovers who discovered it. He later commented to his secretaryJohann Peter Eckermann on January 2, 1824 (as it was recorded by Eckermann and published in his book,Gespräche mit Goethe):[7]
"(Sup.) Fri., Jan. 2. (...) The conversation now turned on “Werther.” “That,” said Goethe, “is a creation which I, like the pelican, fed with the blood of my own heart. It contains so much from the innermost recesses of my breast—so much feeling and thought, that it might easily be spread into a novel of ten such volumes. [...] (...) “On considering more closely the much-talked-of ‘Werther’ period, we discover that it does not belong to the course of universal culture, but to the career of life in every individual, who, with an innate free natural instinct, must accommodate himself to the narrow limits of an antiquated world. Obstructed fortune, restrained activity, unfulfilled wishes, are not the calamities of any particular time, but those of every individual man; and it would be bad, indeed, if every one had not, once in his life, known a time when ‘Werther’ seemed as if it had been written for him alone.”"
The Sorrows of Young Werther turned Goethe, previously an unknown author, into a literary celebrity almost overnight.Napoleon Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European literature, having written a Goethe-inspired soliloquy in his youth and carriedWerther with him on hiscampaigning to Egypt. It also started the phenomenon known as "Werther Fever," which caused young men throughout Europe to dress in the clothing style described for Werther in the novel.[8][9] Items of merchandising such as prints, decoratedMeissen porcelain and even a perfume were produced.[10]Thomas Carlyle coined an epithet, "Wertherism",[11] to describe the self-indulgency of the age that the phenomenon represented.[12] When Goethe completed Werther, he likened his mood to one experienced “after a general confession, joyous and free and entitled to a new life”. For Goethe the Werther effect was a cathartic one, freeing himself from the despair in his life.[3]
The book reputedly also led to some of the first known examples ofcopycat suicide, also known as the "Werther effect". The men were often dressed in the same clothing "as Goethe's description of Werther and using similar pistols." Often the book was found at the scene of the suicide.[13]Rüdiger Safranski, a modern biographer of Goethe, dismisses the Werther Effect "as only a persistent rumor."[14] Nonetheless, this aspect of "Werther Fever" was watched with concern by the authorities – both the novel and the Werther clothing style were banned inLeipzig in 1775; the novel was also banned in Denmark and Italy.[10] It was also watched with fascination by fellow authors. One of these,Friedrich Nicolai, decided to create a satirical piece with a happy ending, entitledDie Freuden des jungen Werthers ("The Joys of Young Werther"), in which Albert, having realized what Werther is up to, loaded chicken's blood into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther's suicide, and happily concedes Charlotte to him. After some initial difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen.[15]
Goethe, however, was not pleased with the "Freuden" and started a literary war with Nicolai that lasted all his life, writing a poem titled "Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe" ("Nicolai on Werther's grave"), in which Nicolai (here a passing nameless pedestrian) defecates on Werther's grave,[16] so desecrating the memory of a Werther from which Goethe had distanced himself in the meantime, as he had from theSturm und Drang. This argument was continued in his collection of short and critical poems theXenien and his playFaust.
TheHebrew translationיסורי ורתר הצעיר was popular among youths in the Zionist communities inBritish Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and was blamed for the suicide of several young men considered to have emulated Werther.[citation needed]
The book influencedUgo Foscolo'sThe Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, which tells of a young man who commits suicide, out of desperation caused not only by love, but by the political situation of Italy beforeItalian unification. This is taken to be the first Italian epistolary novel.[22]
Thomas Mann's 1939 novelLotte in Weimar recounts a fictional reunion between Goethe and his youthful passion, Charlotte Buff, as elderlies.
In 1968 Jean-Pierre Lajournade made a metacinematic critical reading of the novel inWerther (akaLes Souffrances du jeune Werther), a film made for TV infused with the aesthetics and the politics of the time.
A 2002 episode of the Canadian television seriesHistory Bites titled "Love & Death" is about the cultural impact ofWerther, withBob Bainborough satirically portraying Goethe in 1780 as a guest on a talk show spoofingThe Rosie O'Donnell Show. Goethe wants to discuss his newest work, an adaptation ofIphigenia in Tauris, but is annoyed by having to deal with obsessive fans ofWerther.
Ulrich Plenzdorf, aGDR poet, wrote a satirical novel (and play) calledDie neuen Leiden des jungen W. ("The New Sorrows of Young W."), transposing the events into an East German setting, with the protagonist as an ineffectual teenager rebelling against the system.[25]
The 2010 German filmGoethe! is a fictional account of the relations between the young Goethe, Charlotte Buff and her fiancé Kestner, which at times draws on that of Werther, Charlotte and Albert.
The 2014 novelThe Sorrows of Young Mike by John Zelazny is a loosely autobiographical parody of Goethe's novel.[26]
In the 2015 game,The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt'sBlood and Wine expansion pack, there is a treasure hunt called "The Suffering of Young Francois", where a man named François seeks help from a witch to make a woman named Charlotte, who is engaged with Albert, fall in love with him. The witch tricked François, making a Spriggan appear in the state and murder everyone. When François learns of this, he hangs himself.
^Ferdinand Mount (2017)."Super Goethe".The New York Review of Books.64 (20).
^Friedrich Nicolai:Freuden des jungen Werthers. Leiden und Freuden Werthers des Mannes. Voran und zuletzt ein Gespräch. Klett, Stuttgart 1980,ISBN3-12-353600-9
